Pakistan: Religious freedom and blasphemy

EDITORIAL: DAILY TIMES

The US State Department’s Religious Freedoms Report for 2011 makes an interesting study of minorities’ position in Muslim countries (and beyond), particularly with regard to political changes brought about by the Arab Spring. Despite what the western press, public and polity have embraced as positive advances, particularly in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, there are growing concerns among religious and ethnic minorities in these countries about freedoms generally, and religious freedoms in particular, under increasingly rightist and Islamist setups. These are not the easiest of these societies’ features for the wider world to understand at a glance, yet the report rightly notes their significance for the months and years to come. As regards Pakistan, our controversial blasphemy law seems to have touched a raw nerve, and rightly so. Few arguments, if any, can be seriously circulated that disprove its misuse, if not abuse, for purposes as far removed from its original elan as it is possible to imagine. It was unfortunate, to say the least, that civil society watched dumbfounded when former governor (late) Salman Taseer’s bold stand for a poor Christan female victim of the law earned him a fanatical assassin’s bullets. And the tragedy degenerated into a bigger travesty of justice when the deranged murderer was lauded, even lionised by people whose minds can only be described as warped. It bears noting that conspiracy theorists tracing the genesis of Islamic radicalism to the west’s need for a ‘replacement’ global enemy after the fall of communism miss the real thrust of the problem. It is more an unintended consequence of relying on extremist elements to achieve overtly political gains, particularly the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, a leg of the Great Game of which we were an integral part. That since then these militias mutated into well-knit fighting machines, thronging to wherever there is the slightest chance of conflict, is by now more or less widely accepted. And once their global jihad ideology began attracting extremists from across Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe and even mainland America, they developed dynamics of their own that have had the world’s best military and intelligence agencies behind the curve for some time now. The west’s xenophobic reaction, particularly in France and Belgium, also finds few adherents save extremists of another kind. Such policy, though a product of economic, social as well as religious tendencies, is counterproductive, and needs checking. In our own neck of the woods, there is an urgent need to reinvent the secular, tolerant, multi-religious, multi-ethnic Pakistan of the Quaid’s vision, a country that favours coexistence, not confrontation, internally or externally. A Pakistan at peace with itself and the world was what the Quaid envisaged. We have long been critiqued for the influence we export. Perhaps a return to a more rational political equilibrium will merit similar attention, and import.